The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

Language change and grammar change 21would include a system of verb endings) stands in opposition to the group ofproperties typical of another. Within one class, properties tend to correlatewith each other. A particular class need not be completely homogeneous: someelements belonging to it are in the core of the class. They are then called prototypical,having all the characteristics of the class. Among verbs, these would bethe lexical verbs with a full system of morphological inflections and syntacticcomplementation patterns. Other elements may be less precisely defined: theylack some properties typical of the class. Warner argues that the Old Englishmodals give evidence of being such a less precisely defined category: they arelexical verbs, since they have the possibility of taking nominal complementsand tensed clause complements. And they have a wider range of inflectionsthan their present-day counterparts. But they are not prototypical lexical verbs.Evidence for this is that in some constructions they behave much like thepresent-day English modals in not having a subject of their own and being sentencemodifiers. With respect to the morphology, Warner also shows that someof the modals (the precursors of must and shall) occur only as finite forms asearly as the Old English period (contra Lightfoot 1979). Thus, they are verbsin Old English, but not prototypical verbs. From the early Middle Englishperiod on, the verbal properties they had became less and less prominent,witness the changes observed by Lightfoot summarized in (2) and (3) above.The modals lost their prototypical verbal properties (nominal and tensedclause complements; further loss of verb inflections) and came to be largelyused as sentence modifiers in conjunction with bare infinitives. The categorialreanalysis advanced by Lightfoot now takes on a different guise: in Warner’sview this is not a radical reanalysis. Rather, the modals shifted from being aperipheral verbal category, to being a separate category Auxiliary. From thetime that this happened, the differences in syntactic behaviour between mainverbs and modals became more prominent. Likewise, the precursors of theauxiliaries have and be acquired more auxiliary properties, and do was establishedas a dummy auxiliary. In Warner (1993), this account feeds into adetailed treatment of the development of the morphosyntactic properties ofEnglish auxiliaries from the perspective of Head-driven Phrase StructureGrammar. Comparing this account with that of Lightfoot, we see that Warnertreats the changes in the modals as gradual, and much of the graduality is inthe nature of the categorization of the modals; the shifting morphosyntacticand semantic properties are a reflex of this.Anderson (1993; 1997) has developed a theory of notional grammar inwhich categories are defined in terms of the notional components P(redicative)and N(ominal), the first being associated with categories that define situations,the second with categories that define things. The most basic categories